Predictors of Picture Naming and Picture Categorization in Spanish

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to identify which psycholinguistic variables are better predictors of performance for healthy participants in a picture naming task and in a picture categorization task. A correlation analysis and a Path analysis were carried out. The correlation analysis showed that naming accuracy and naming latency are significant and positively correlated with lexical frequency and conceptual familiarity variables, whereas they are negatively correlated with H index. Reaction times in the categorization task were negatively correlated with lexical frequency and conceptual familiarity variables and positively correlated with visual complexity variable. The Path analysis showed that subjective lexical frequency and H index are the better predictors for picture naming task. In picture categorization task, for reaction times, the better predictor variables were subjective lexical frequency, conceptual familiarity and visual complexity. These findings are discussed considering previous works on the field.

Keywords

• psycholinguistic variables
• predictor variables
• picture naming
• picture categorization
• accuracy
• reaction times